Elements of Rationalist Discourse

2. Non-Violence: Argument gets counter-argument. Argument does not get bullet. Argument does not get doxxing, death threats, or coercion.^[1]

I'd want to include some kinds of social responses as unacceptable as well. Derision, mockery, acts to make the argument low status, ad hominems, etc. 

You can choose not to engage with bad arguments, but you shouldn't engage by not addressing the arguments and instead trying to execute some social maneuver to discredit it. 

love this post. meta-note: it would be really great to have visited link highlighting on by default on lesswrong, to make posts with very heavy referencing like this easier to navigate.

Feel free to delete this if it feels off-topic, but on a meta note about discussion norms, I was struck by that meme about C code. Basically, the premise that there is higher code quality when there is swearing.

I was also reading discussions in the linux mailinglists- the discussions there are clear, concise, and frank. And occasionally, people still use scathing terminology and feedback.

I wonder if people would be interested in setting up a few discussion posts where specific norms get called out to "participate in good faith but try to break these specific norms"

And people play a mix-and-match to see which ones are most fun, engaging and interesting for participants. This would probably end in disaster if we started tossing slurs willy-nilly, but sometimes while reading posts, I think people could cut down on the verbiage by 90% and keep the meaning.

Strong upvoted; these also feel closer to the "core" virtues to me, even though there's nothing wrong with Duncan's post.

Flag your inferences as inferences

Cultivating what Korzybski dubbed Consciousness of Abstraction (ie not unconsciously abstracting) improves things a lot eg noticing what metaphors are being deployed as part of an argument about the generalizability of your experience. To develop this, it was useful to first do the easier task of noticing when and how others are abstracting.

I've rewritten this post for the EA Forum [EA · GW], to help introduce more EAs to rationalist culture and norms. The rewrite goes into more detail about a lot of the points, explaining jargon, motivating some of the less intuitive norms, etc. I expect some folks will prefer that version, and some will prefer the LW version.

(One shortcoming of the EA Forum version is that it's less concise. Another shortcoming is that there's more chance I got stuff wrong, since I erred on the side of "spell things out more in the hope of conveying more of the spirit to people who are new to this stuff", rather than "leave more implicit so that the things I say out loud can all be things I feel really confident about".)

(Edit: Already fixed, no longer relevant.)

Try not to “win” arguments using asymmetric weapons (tools that work similarly well whether you're right or wrong).

Should be "symmetric". From Scott's post:

Logical debate has one advantage over narrative, rhetoric, and violence: it’s an asymmetric weapon. That is, it’s a weapon which is stronger in the hands of the good guys than in the hands of the bad guys.

You've also repeated the incorrect usage in two [LW(p) · GW(p)] comments [LW(p) · GW(p)] to this post.

There is an interesting variation of rule 1 (truth-seeking). According to common understanding, this rule seems to imply that if we argue for X, we should only do so if we believe X to more than 50%. Similarly rule 3. But recently a number of philosophers have argued that (at least in academic context) you can actually argue for interesting hypotheses without believing in them. This is sometimes called "championing", and described as a form of epistemic group-rationality, which says that sometimes individually irrational arguments can be group-rational.

The idea is that truth seeking is viewed as a competitive-collaborative process, which has benefits when people specialize in certain outsider theories and champion them. In some contexts it is fairly likely that some outsider theory is true, even though each individual outsider theory has a much lower probability than the competing mainstream theory. If everyone argued for the most likely (mainstream) theory, there would be too little "intellectual division of labor"; hardly anyone would bother arguing for individually unlikely theories.

(This recent essay [LW · GW] might be interpreted as an argument for championing.)

It might be objected that the championers should be honest and report that they find the interesting theory they champion ultimately unlikely to be true. But this could have bad effects for the truth-seeking process of the group: Why should anyone feel challenged by someone advocating a provocative hypothesis when the advocators themselves don't believe it? The hypothesis would lose much of its provocativeness, and the challenged people wouldn't really feel challenged. It wouldn't encourage fruitful debate.

(This is can also be viewed as a solution to the disagreement paradox: Why could it ever be rational to disagree with our epistemic peers? Shouldn't we average our opinions? Answer: Averaging might be individually rational, but not group-rational.)

It's a fine post, but I don't love this set of recommendations and justifications, and I feel like rationalist norms & advice should be held to a high standard, so I'm not upvoting it in the review. I'll give some quick pointers to why I don't love it.

1. Truth-Seeking: Seems too obvious to be useful advice. Also I disagree with the subpoint about never treating arguments like soldiers, I think two people inhabiting opposing debate-partners is sort of captured by this and I think this is a healthy truth-seeking process.
2. Non-Violence: All the examples of things you're not supposed to do in response to an argument are things you're not supposed to do anyway. Also it seems too much like it's implying the only response to an argument is a counter-argument. Sometimes the correct response to bad argument is to fire someone or attempt to politically disempower them. As an example, Zvi Mowshowitz presents evidence and argument in Repeal the Jones Act of 1920 [LW · GW] that there are a lot of terrible and disingenuous arguments being put forward by unions that are causing a total destruction of the US shipping industry. The generator here of arguments seems reliably non-truth-tracking, and I would approve of someone repealing the Jones act without persuading such folks or spending the time to refute each and every argument.
3. Non-Deception: I'll quote the full description here:
   1. "Never try to steer your conversation partners (or onlookers) toward having falser models. Where possible, avoid saying stuff that you expect to lower the net belief accuracy of the average reader; or failing that, at least flag that you're worried about this happening."
   2. I think that the space of models one walks through is selected for both accuracy and usefulness. Not all models are equally useful. I might steer someone from a perfectly true but vacuous model, to a less perfect but more practical model, thereby net reducing the accuracy of a person's statements and beliefs (most of the time). I prefer something more like a standard of "Intent to Inform".

Various other ones are better, some are vague, many things are presented without justification and I suspect I might disagree if it was offered. I think Zack M. Davis's critique [LW · GW] of 'goodwill' is good.

I wish Brevity was considered another important rationalist virtue. Unfortunately, it isn't practiced as such, including by me.

In programming, "lines of code" is a cost, not an accomplishment. It's a proxy for something we care about (like the functionality and robustness of a program), but all other things being equal, we'd prefer the number to be as small as possible. Similarly, the number of words in our posts and comments is a cost for the things we actually care about (e.g. legible communication), and all other things being equal, we'd prefer this number to be as small as possible.

These are also related costs: complexity, jargon, parenthetical asides (like the ones in this comment), clarifications, footnotes, ...

That doesn't mean that the costs are never worth paying. Just that they shouldn't be paid mindlessly, and that brevity is too often subordinated to other virtues and goals.

Finally, there are some ways to add and edit text whose benefits imo usually outweigh their costs: like adding outlines and headings, or using formatting.

I appreciate the clarity and thoroughness of this post. It's a useful distillation of communication norms that nurture understanding and truth-seeking. As someone who has sometimes struggled with getting my point across effectively, these guidelines serve as a solid reminder to stay grounded in both purpose and goodwill. It's reassuring to know that there's an ever-evolving community working towards refining the art of conversation for collective growth.

Curate. I want to curate this post in the same manner that Raemon curated [LW(p) · GW(p)] Basics of Rationalist Discourse [LW · GW]. This post contains a list of non-universal/non-standard ways for people to communicate, that do allow for better truthseeking. These are two recent posts on the topic, but I'd be keen to see more exploration of how do we communicate better, and how we can quickly get many more new people to pick up these ideals and methods.

Valence-Owning

Could you please give a definition of the word valence? The definition I found doesn't make sense to me: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/valence

The LessWrong Review [? · GW] runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2024. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.

Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?

Reality-Minding. Keep your eye on the ball, hug [LW · GW] the query, and don’t lose sight of object-level [LW · GW] reality [LW · GW].

A relevant post: Consume fiction wisely [LW · GW]. 

TLDR: Fiction is often harmful for your mind, and it is often made to manipulate you.

The post got surprisingly controversial. It seems that even in this community many people are disturbed by the idea that watching Hollywood movies or reading fantasy - is harmful for cognition. 

i may be should (and probably will not) write my own post about Goodwill. instead i will say in comment what Goodwill is about, by my definition. 

Goodwill, the way i see it, on the emotional level, is basically respect and cooperation. when someone make an argument, do you try to see to what area in ConceptSpace they are trying to gesturing, and then asking clarifying questions to understand, or do you round it up to the nearest stupid position, and not even see the actual argument being made? do you even see then saying something incoherent and try to parse it, instead of proving it wrong?

the standard definition of Goodwill does not include the ways in which failure of Goodwill is failure of rationality. is failure of seeing what someone is trying to say, to understand their position and their framing.

civility is good for its own sake. but almost everyone who decided to be uncivil end up strawmanning their opponents, end up with more wrong map of the world. what may look like forgiveness from outside, for rationalist, should look from inside like remembering that we expect short inferential distances [LW · GW] and that politics wrecks your ability to do math and your believes filter your receptions, so depends on your side in argument.


i gained my understanding of those phenomenons mostly from the Rational Blogosphere, and saw it as part of rationality. there is important difference between person executing the algorithm "being civil and forgiving", and people executing algorithm "remember about biases and inferential distances, and try to overcome them", that implemented by understanding the importance of cooperating even after perceived defection in noisy environment, in the prisoner's dilemma, and by assuming that communication is hard ind miscommunications are frequent, etc.